


From A Broken Mold

by kylostahp (hawkeward)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, this was a weird mash-up of meta and fic in answer to a headcanon question okay leave me alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-06-03 11:46:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6609511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkeward/pseuds/kylostahp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here is what it’s like to grow up the son of Commandant Brendol Hux.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From A Broken Mold

Here is what it’s like to grow up the son of Commandant Brendol Hux:

Your birth comes at a turning point—the Empire is at the height of its power, and then suddenly it is not. The galaxy changes before you can form conscious memories, decades of ironclad order and your father’s career dissolve in a series of losses from which neither will ever recover. You were conceived in the flush of triumph, but you will be raised in the ashes of defeat.

Your childhood is a blur of instability as the remains of the Empire settle further and further from the Core, creeping even beyond the Outer Rim into territory barely charted. By the time your family stays in one place for more than a standard year, you’ve lived on more than a dozen worlds.

For all that she isn’t programed for childcare, DDM-38 is your most consistent companion during that time—a cold, faceless taskmaster of grooming, education, and behavior befitting the Commandant’s son. On your eighth birthday, your father has her scrapped. You cry hot, silent tears into your pillow that night, without understanding why—she was only a droid, after all.

After that, your education is taken over by various tutors, overseen always by your father. You’re warmed by his attention—the fact that he’s taken an interest in you, _at last—_ even when he leaves ten stinging stripes on the backs of your thighs for the wrinkles in your jumpsuit at morning inspection.

Your studies include history, protocol, the approved strategies cemented over decades of Imperial military dominance—you memorize troop movements, ship deployments, lists of commanders and where they were trained. Carida, Prefsbelt, Coruscant, Lothal, _Arkanis_. You sometimes wonder if you’re missing something, some crucial meaning in the endless recital of dead names.

Arkanis wasn’t considered the most elite of even the senior Academies, but hundreds of the finest Imperial officers were trained there. Many went on to serve on the _Executor,_ the Death Star—the most elite postings for rising stars, but all still just so much space dust in the end. Your father, you realize over the years, mourns the loss of Palpatine’s Empire and his own grand design more than he ever does those dead cadets.

There are still plenty of families who desire an Imperial education for their sons and daughters–as successors to the Academies begin to spring up, he agrees to return to teaching, and in the absence of the old intermural hierarchy being able to say you were trained by Brendol Hux begins to carry weight. It doesn’t take you long to learn to recognize the looks directed your way as the envy of rivals, not the respect of peers.

It also doesn’t take you long to learn to leverage it. You tell yourself that your father’s name may open doors, but it’s your own two feet that stand and walk through them. You may even believe it, someday, when you stand on the bridge of a Star Destroyer.

One door that opens is an invitation to transfer to another of the fledgling Academies when you’re fourteen. A blatant attempt to take you as a pawn in a political game a decade dead—but all dejarik players know that a pawn can become something more if it reaches the other side of the gameboard.

You’re still young enough to believe that maybe there will be a fight—your chest knots with a mingling of dread and desperate, sick, buried _hope_ that your father will forbid it, will show for once some desire to keep you, even out of simple spite. Instead he signs the transfer with a flick of his stylus and not even a glance in your direction, and the knot in your chest quietly settles into a cold weight like the core of a dead star.

You do well at the new Academy. It’s a forward-thinking place—innovative techniques, strategies borrowed from unexpected sources. Less of a thrall to tradition. It’s there that you first hear of a new movement, a revolution by the best and brightest to take back what was their birthright and return the galaxy to the order that made it flourish. What will one day be a General takes root in ground made rich by a decaying Empire, and begins its slow growth.

Your father, you quickly find, does not care for this rising power. It’s a pale imitation of history—children, playing at their parents’ glory. It has no leader and no real authority. _It will,_ you argue, uncharacteristic heat spiking in your voice. You were robbed of the chance to so much as _believe_ in Palpatine and the lost Empire, but the First Order you can have a hand in building, through your own strategies and sleepless nights, with sweat and blood and willing sacrifice.

The most promising cadets of your class are once allowed a visit to the secret facility housing the revitalized Stormtrooper program—you watch conscripts half your age train in brutalizing conditions, shaped from near-infancy to be the loyal soldiers you will one day command, and try not to laugh at how your father’s ideas were finally adopted by a cause he refuses to accept. You manage to keep a straight face, right up until you’re confronted by the prominent portrait of him in the base commander’s office.

On a last, brief leave before the Academy’s final term, you ask—midway through an ill-advised argument, fury crowding out cold reason as it paints color high on your cheeks—if he would have preferred having a clone to a son. You’re no fool—you expect the backhand that splits your lip. You don’t expect the way his shoulders curve and stutter when he turns away, hand pressed to his mouth as if he were the one with blood suddenly oozing slowly down his chin.

You go straight from the Academy into the fledgling First Order military, along with nearly all of your peers–it gives you a small amount of grim pleasure that the thought likely grates on your father to no end, that his own hand-picked and carefully-tended students follow the same path as his unlucky burden of a son. Not even a handful of years later, you outrank them all. There is no congratulatory message.

The Starkiller project is top-secret, so classified that even the highest-ranking officers are prohibited personal holocomm calls. Instead, all personnel are encouraged to file recorded statements to be sent to designated recipients in the event of untimely death. You are unfailing in composing daily speeches for your command, but never seem to find time to even begin drafting last words for your family.

Your father has always been described to you as a congenial man. He laughed easily, his smile was infectious. He spoke eloquently, in that way that makes every listener feel special, like he was addressing them alone. You smile and nod when they speak of him fondly, but remain unable to remember a time that he looked at you when speaking, or any expression but bitterness touched his lips.

You refuse to lose yourself that way. You will not wallow in a past generation’s failure, regretting what was lost. You will move ever-forward, take the wrecked foundations you are given and build higher than before.

And yet, as you streak away from the collapsing nova of the Starkiller with only the coat on your back and a broken knight to your name, you find that–possibly for the first time in your life, certainly more than you ever did before—you understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell with me on [tumblr](http://kylostahp.tumblr.com) about the Imperial Exile and the rise of the First Order.


End file.
